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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24942529">Ant Farming For Beginners</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon'>Tlon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doom Patrol (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Actually Sort Of A Happy Ending, Angst, Animal Death, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Canon-Typical Internalized Homophobia, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Introspection, Medical Experimentation, Military-Mad Science Complex, Through S02E03-compliant, Torture, emotional development, whole mess of pronouns for keeg here</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:54:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,870</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24942529</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tlon/pseuds/Tlon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The first torture after Larry Trainor's crash is the kind Larry inflicts on himself. The rest is utterly, hideously <i>normal</i>.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>41</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Ant Farming For Beginners</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The first torture after Larry Trainor's crash is the kind Larry inflicts on himself. After all, it's a central character motif. Why not establish it right away?</p><p>Here's how it goes. Larry is in a hospital bed, a man who loves him just beyond a pane of glass. The barriers Larry constructed between them are gone; his wife considers him a dead man, his charred body will never fly again. He has nothing left to lose with John – not even his own skin. And he turns him away.</p><p>Larry will revisit this decision endlessly in the months to come. Sometimes he'll conclude it was noble. Sometimes he'll conclude it was selfish. And eventually he'll conclude it was cheap. He's used to abandoning things because he'll always find new things – another assignment, another city, another life to wear out. He's used to hating himself in a world that loves him.</p><p>Larry thinks he knows all about being a monster. But he doesn't know what it's like to be seen as one. Yet.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
</div><p>He starts learning in the hospital. The nurses enter his lead-lined room in foil suits and never speak. They don't come with food or water, only a nutrient drip that they stab into one not-quite-ruined vein. He doesn't need a doctor to understand he should be dead; his body must be changed somehow, no longer human. This must be the radiation exposure, he thinks. Because it's 1963, and that's how people think radiation fucking works.</p><p>Death must be coming soon, though. If he had a future, an officer would come tell him what to do with it. Because that's how the military says it fucking works – and if it's going to break rules now, why did he spend all those years following them?</p><p>He almost still believes in that when he wakes up bottled in a tube, staring into the grin of a man who is utterly, hideously normal.</p><p>The man is Charles Forsythe, DoD, but Larry barely registers the name. He's trying to remember when he signed the papers that would let someone lock him up like a piece of equipment and wheel him out to – God, where is this place?</p><p>“I never agreed to any of this,” he pleads, but it only sounds naïve. His service is compulsory. And while he might have the moral high ground, they've got his air supply... and he's human enough to keep breathing when they pump in the knockout gas.</p><p>He wakes up in shackles and on display. It's another lead-lined room with another man beyond a pane of glass, but this man isn't John – it's Forsythe, and his gaze is not love, but fascination and disgust. <i>That's</i> the look Larry's been waiting to see for decades. That's the normal look.</p><p>Outside he'd managed to fool them all. Here, he can't deny how unnatural he is. It's written all over his exposed, never-healing flesh. It's deep inside his cells, which won't freeze even as the room temperature drops: twenty below, forty, a hundred. He struggles until the cuffs are rings of ice biting his wrists and the air is a knife in his lungs. The scientists outside take studious notes. Do they not care if this kills him? Or did they know the outcome and subject him to it anyway?</p><p>Can anything kill him?</p><p>The cold can't do it. Heat doesn't, either – air raised to the boiling point, marked on a thermometer facing inward, like they want to drive his inhuman condition home.</p><p>At least it's only his newest condition; there's some consolation in that. Nobody can blame him for burning up in a plane crash. He never chose to fly into a... a freak radiation storm, or whatever the hell it was that took him down. Never decided to do it year after year, even when he could see the fallout, even when he could feel what it was making him – </p><p>“Tell me about Ellsworth.”</p><p>No. Please. Forsythe can't know.</p><p>“I'm not telling you anything,” Larry says.</p><p>“How about Charleston, then? Or Edwards? Quite a few transfers in such a short period of time. It's not <i>normal</i>.”  Forsythe loads the word with purpose. “Seems you've struggled with normal for your entire life.”</p><p>This is objectively correct. By the standards of what Larry calls himself, it's delicate. But in that moment, he learns something any full-time monster knows: it's easier to tell the world to stop hurting you than to stop hurting yourself.</p><p>“Fuck you,” he says.</p><p>Forsythe misses Larry's revelation. He's on the phone.</p><p>Larry catches fragments of the conversation: <i>Cuba, collateral damage, contingency plan.</i> With a pang of guilt he hopes something terrible is happening outside, just so Forsythe will go deal with it and leave him alone.</p><p>“Good news, Captain Trainor,” he says instead. “A new mission has presented itself. The red menace is knocking on our door not one hundred miles from Miami. Thousands of American lives in the balance.”</p><p>“What the hell do you people want from me?”</p><p>Larry already understands what they want. He might try not to hurt anyone with his personal degeneracies, but categorically he's right there with the kidnappers, the pedophiles... and the cold-blooded killers. A normal person might not see the difference.</p><p>He'll show them, he thinks. He'll prove them wrong.</p><p>Then he refuses and they jab him with cattle prods until it feels like he's being torn apart, until his body must be so overfilled with pain that it shuts down, and when he wakes up there are three corpses in the room with him.</p><p>So that conviction lasts all of one hour.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
</div><p>Larry decides to call the thing inside him a spirit. This sounds unscientific, which is the point. He feels no logic watching it burst out of him on grainy closed-circuit camera. It provokes a mix of bone-deep horror and transcendent awe, a delicate silhouette of sparks that dances deadly in thin air.</p><p>As for everyone else? Well, a piece of the most powerful nation in the world has just discovered irrefutable proof that humanity is not alone in the universe. Do they figure out where it came from? Develop a common language? Tap in Earth's greatest astrophysicists and philosophers? Of course not. They torture the hell out of the man it's living in.</p><p>Their facility is called the Ant Farm. A series of tunnels with no room for the unexpected, where every specimen that arrives is sorted by base genetic impulse: is it threat, or is it food? The answer is usually both.</p><p>Their department is called the Bureau of Normalcy. It is the paper that sands the rough edges from society, the hammer that smashes sharp nails into plaster until they are safe, productive, and expertly placed. The technician that identifies a machine's purpose and fixes it. If the machine happens to think it's made for something else... that's just another broken circuit.</p><p>Next time Forsythe visits he doesn't make Larry an offer. He sends a man to set a metal table in the test chamber and set a rabbit on the table, squirming beneath cotton straps on a steel board.</p><p>The rabbit keens and shivers immediately. Then something swells beneath its white fur. Its whimper turns into a scream.</p><p>“Did your father ever make you snap a rabbit's neck? Chop the head off a chicken?” Forsythe asks. “Probably not. That kind of thing makes a real man.”</p><p>The rabbit twists its neck at a sickening angle to sink its teeth into the restraints, and when that fails, into the hair and blistering flesh beneath them. Larry strains against the cuffs as it thrashes – he owes it some kind of effort, even a useless one.</p><p>“Did yours have to stop you from torturing small animals?” he hisses.</p><p>“I never knew my father, Captain Trainor. It's what gives me hope for people like you. Because I was born into a situation like that... and look how I turned out.”</p><p>The rabbit gives a final cry from a raw and peeling muzzle. Then finally, mercifully, it lies still.</p><p>“In any case, proficiency in that particular area apparently belongs to you,” says Forsythe, glancing at the burned and bloodied thing on the table. “But we'll have to replicate the findings.”</p><p>At the second rabbit Larry tries not to watch. At the third even the lab techs seem sick of it.</p><p>“Oh. Look. An <i>experiment</i>,” Larry says as they bring in the fourth, choking back bile. “What could <i>possibly</i> happen this time? Got a real fucking mystery on your hands.”</p><p>One of the techs behind the glass looks away. Forsythe catches it and glares.</p><p>“We could always try something else,” he tells Larry. “Or someone. Not all our subjects are as irreplaceable as you.”</p><p>Larry closes his eyes. This is no kind of science, but it's taught him one thing: No one can ever touch him again.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
</div><p>Larry doesn't know this, but nobody upstairs expects scientific breakthroughs from the Ant Farm. Good research requires a certain respect for the subject. The bureau wouldn't know where to start and never has. It was the Bureau of Oddities in the age of the gawking gentleman explorer – that Pith-helmeted Victorian version of a tourist with a Hawaiian shirt and an overpriced camera, dropping candy wrappers from his pockets while he's putting every new and beautiful thing in a cage. And those were its good old days.</p><p>The Bureau of Normalcy hires well-adjusted individuals, and deep down they can't believe there's anything about deviants worth learning. So they poke and scrape like well-adjusted children pulling wings off butterflies, while the boys in the Pentagon breathe a little easier knowing they're occupied, not palling around with Joe McCarthy or planting bugs for J. Edgar Hoover. It's hard enough managing real science. The serious CIA stuff. Like slipping LSD into office party punch bowls.</p><p>On the other hand, the bureau is significantly better at keeping secrets. So to the rest of the world Larry Trainor is still dead, and in the depths of the Ant Farm he's still wondering if he can die.</p><p>“We're getting a sense of your offensive capabilities, Captain Trainor,” says Forsythe. “We'd like to test your resilience.”</p><p>There's no point in responding. But Forsythe is the only conversation he gets – the only one who even addresses him like a person.</p><p>“Frying and flash-freezing wasn't enough.” </p><p>“I'll credit you with resistance to the elements. I was thinking something a little more hands-on.”</p><p>The airlock door opens. Its three suited techs hang back a little; they probably remember what happened to the first batch. Forsythe stares them into submission.</p><p>One of the techs grabs his wrist, and for the first time in God knows how long, a cuff comes off. Larry looks up in confusion, but he can't see faces through the suits, only black panes like switched-off televisions. The other cuff unlocks and he nearly collapses – he's stopped counting the days since he took a step. As he tries to brace himself, a baton slams into his jaw.</p><p>The blow cracks his head against the railing, but it's still better than the prod. Combat reflexes kick in, ignoring the burn of unused muscles to block the next hit. The techs are clumsy in their suits; maybe he could handle a fight against one of them. Here, he hasn't got a chance. One kicks a weakened leg and he goes down, until another grabs his arms and forces him back to his knees. A boot crushes his ankle along with any hope of getting to his feet again.</p><p>Then his chest flickers blue, and everyone in the chamber freezes.</p><p>The spirit can make this stop, just like before. The thing he <i>really</i> is can kill another room of people while the man he thought he was goes hollow.</p><p>“Don't,” he tells it, wondering if it can hear him. “Don't do this. Don't –”</p><p>“Have some respect for the institution, Captain. A soldier doesn't beg.”</p><p>Larry looks down. The light pulses for a few seconds and retreats, leaving him alone and himself.</p><p>“Not – ” The baton cracks against his head again and a prod is jammed into his shoulders, and breathing is an insurmountable task. He doesn't see the light again.</p><p>It feels like hours after that. A tech gives his ribs a final kick as he's slumped on the floor, and Larry lifts his head enough to see Forsythe through one bloodshot eye.</p><p>“Not you,” Larry croaks.</p><p>“What's that?”</p><p>“Not you. I wasn't begging <i>you.</i>”</p><p>Forsythe only laughs. It doesn't matter. He needs to understand: Larry is not afraid of this world. He does not ask for mercy from this world. He is terrified only of the things inside himself that have made this world so miserable.</p><p>Or at least he tells himself that. It's the only way someone could lie on a cement floor in a locked cell, two ribs fractured and flesh one supercontinent of an impossible bruise, and believe that he is somehow <i>in control of this situation</i>.</p><p>Larry does not have this level of meta-awareness about his character motivations, only a constant, resonant throb of agony that keeps him from passing out. It's odd that he doesn't hurt all the time; that would be a logical side effect of having skin that seems to never grow back. Maybe whatever's keeping him alive learned his body at the moment of the crash, decided that was the natural form it should preserve for him.</p><p>This is probably not canon. As a working theory it holds up.</p><p>He drifts through bouts of unconsciousness interrupted by a tech with a printed pain scale. Larry won't point to anything except the far face with its tearful grimace – forget the injuries, he's accounting for being locked alone in a goddamn cage – but soon his body feels tender instead of simply pulverized and his ribs no longer stab when he breathes.</p><p>His relief quickly gives way to creeping dread. He remains unclear on what might kill him. It's becoming very clear how much the Ant Farm can do to him and how often they can do it.</p><p>Forsythe replicates his experiment three times. After that he begins to elaborate.</p><p>They come with acid twice, pouring it methodically down one shackled arm while Larry screams. With scalpels after that to excise chunks of a shoulder. A cloth and a bucket of water – that research ends before he learns if he can drown. Stretches of nothing while the spirit knits him back into the precise level of ruin where it found him.</p><p>“Why aren't you afraid of it?” he asks Forsythe after they've pared two of his fingers nearly to bone. “If you think I can control it – ”</p><p>“Believe me, we're not under that illusion.”</p><p>“Then <i>why aren't you afraid?</i> That glass is probably nothing. It could kill you – ”</p><p>Forsythe snaps his fingers. One of the techs draws a pistol – gunslinger-fast even in thick rubber gloves. He presses it to Larry's temple.</p><p>“You think this... thing cares what happens to me?”</p><p>“We think it needs you. Alive, at least.”</p><p>“Was that in one of your experiments?”</p><p>Forsythe gestures again, and the tech holsters the gun to revisit the scalpel. “It's an informed observation,” he says. “Nothing would stick around you unless it really had no choice.”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
</div><p>They have to get tired of this.</p><p>“They have to get tired of this,” Larry whispers. “They have to get tired of it.”</p><p>Sometimes – on the lonely days between sessions, when his loathing is so great he wants to claw off skin he doesn't have to release it – he wonders what a pointless file the Ant Farm must have on him. Just a checklist of repetitive torments, a column of yes/no boxes: Did it hurt? </p><p>Yes.<br/>
Yes.<br/>
Yes.<br/>
Yes.<br/>
Yes.<br/>
Unbearably.<br/>
So, so goddamn much.</p><p>They'll run out of boxes someday. Eventually the bureau will learn how to weaponize him – lock him in a tube and drop him into Havana, throw him back here until they do it again in Hanoi.</p><p>There are so many layers of prison that he can't even dream of escape. Outside the cell there is the maze of tunnels. Beyond the tunnels will be guards. Beyond the guards is God knows what part of the world. And beyond all that is the knowledge he will kill every single person who might help him. Every single person who tolerates his presence.</p><p>If the spirit would talk to him they could strategize. But he's never even seen it except on video, and all he can do is mutter at it:</p><p>“You should have let me die.”</p><p>It can regrow his fucking muscles and kill anyone who touches him, and it can't manage a voice inside his head. Some pictographs on a wall. If it needs ink he's sure as hell bled enough.</p><p>“I <i>said</i>, you should have let me die. You should let me die <i>now</i>. Go find somebody else to puppet.”</p><p>It could move a jumpsuit strap: one notch for yes, two for no. Larry could come up with pointlessly convoluted systems all day. If it would put in a minimum of fucking effort.</p><p>“This isn't some kind of pity trip. These people are going to torture me for the rest of my life and for all I know the rest of my life is forever. They are going to make me hurt people. You're going to make me hurt people.”</p><p>Maybe it's gone. Maybe it left and he still can't die. Maybe this is how radiation fucking works. He can't let himself consider that.</p><p>“They'll find a way to hurt you. If anything can hurt you. They'll find a way to hurt you too.”</p><p>He catches a hint of blue light ripple through his chest. And if the spirit could produce a bitter electric laugh, they might. Because this man's subconscious cuts like a cave of broken glass, and he's got the gall to suggest nothing can hurt them, and... </p><p>Look, there's been no plot momentum for a few hundred words now. Might as well dabble in omniscient narration.</p><p>The problem is that nothing changes in the Ant Farm. The exact form of the pain cycle might vary; right now it's a body that's shaking from shock treatments and a snapped arm, a bone spearing into open air like even Larry's skeleton is trying to desert him. But it's all one looping pheromone trail reinforced by generations of bureau agents.</p><p>Some agents are not unusually bad men, only ones with no imagination. These take every fresh deviation from normalcy as a personal insult – trying to improve the future is just a way of telling them the past was wrong and they were wrong for living there. The really dangerous ones are those that know better. These are the true lovers of tradition, because they've learned exactly what it will let them get away with.</p><p>As for Larry... imagining something better hurts too much. And imagining anything worse is pointless. The bureau always outdoes it.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
</div><p>A tech throws a plastic suit at him and tells him to put it on. Larry obeys, because it's 1964 and he is so desperately tired.</p><p>“How do you like your suit, Captain Trainor? Comfortable?”</p><p>Forsythe is a dark blur outside Larry's visor and his voice competes with the rasp of Larry's own breathing. The suit is a self-contained environment: leaded rubber, tanks of oxygen, so impermeable the techs have taken off their hazmat gear. A prison inches larger than his body. He runs through the checklist in his head, guessing at what they can do to him in here.</p><p>It's... nothing. Nothing to him, Forsythe says. There's a new list for the thing inside him.</p><p>Larry remembers the eerie form on the television. Maybe Forsythe's lying – nothing as crude and ugly as the Ant Farm should be able to hurt something so elegantly strange. If not... the spirit is stronger than him. It can handle this.</p><p>“I told you so,” he whispers anyway. “I fucking told you so.”</p><p>Then there is nothing, and then there is</p><p>something<br/>
<i>else.</i></p><p>
  <i>He's whole. It's the morning of his flight and he's got hair and skin and someone else's skin against both – John's skin, his fingers, his lips. This must be time travel, Larry thinks, and he can set things right if he can only figure out what right is. It's hard to think because John's skin is...</i>
</p><p>
  <i>burning.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>John is burning.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>His face is blistering with heat; his hair is withering into ash. Larry stumbles back – this is him, John has to get away from him. But it's too late. His palms come away with strips of charred skin and molten fat, John is screaming and the fat sticks to Larry's hands</i>
</p><p><i>like</i><br/>
napalm – </p><p>Larry jolts back into the Ant Farm and his prison-suit. He tries instinctively to pull off his helmet, rattling the handcuffs and gasping for breath.</p><p>“What did you do to me? What – what the hell – did – ”</p><p>“What are you talking about?” The blur that is Forsythe sounds genuinely bemused. “I thought you'd appreciate a little time on leave.”</p><p>“You sent me – you sent me back there – ”</p><p>“We didn't send you anything. If something strange is happening in that poorly wired brain of yours, it's between you and your luminescent friend.”</p><p>The cuffs click off and Larry crumples. Every part of him feels misaligned, slightly out of focus. The techs drag him to his feet, then to the door – where is he going? Is there anything out there anymore?</p><p>“Take him to the cellblock,” Forsythe says. “He's 721.”</p><p>The sudden movement is dizzying; he's forgotten what it was like to have a world bigger than a lead box. But all he can think is that being a number sounds like a relief after trying to be a man. And now he's in a dim cell trying to steady his hands by rubbing his fingers against the suit, making sure they're not still plastered with John's skin. It was a dream. Only a – </p><p>“Hey fella. You okay in there?”</p><p>It's a voice coming from a vent – the first he's heard here that isn't Forsythe's. It must be another prisoner, because the guards have made their silent contempt for him clear.</p><p>“Sounded like you were screaming bloody murder.”</p><p>“No. No, not me.” He can't shake the feeling that there's still something on his hands. “I was unconscious. The screaming was probably from... wait. You could hear it?”</p><p>“And then some. Is there something in there with you?”</p><p>So the spirit can communicate and it's being petty with him. Unless Larry is just so selfish, so broken inside, that he can't hear another creature screaming for help. If the man next door hasn't guessed that already, he'll learn soon enough. Larry should quit while he's ahead.</p><p>“Look. I don't feel like talking anymore, okay?”</p><p>“Say, pal. What's your name?”</p><p>How is he supposed to answer that? If the man remembers <i>Larry Trainor, ace pilot</i> then one more person will learn he was a monster. If he doesn't then Larry will lose that small, stupid conviction that a real and good and safely dead <i>Larry Trainor, ace pilot</i> has been immortalized somewhere outside.</p><p>“Seven twenty-one.”</p><p>He's always been good at leaving things behind.</p><p>That should be the end. Instead, the wall cracks open.</p><p>Larry crawls out of his chair, wondering if he's finally started hallucinating. They're all supposed to be broken here, but there's no second monster in a gas mask on the other side – it's a perfectly bronzed man who'd fit better on a Coney Island boardwalk, offering escape as casually as a cigarette.</p><p>And true to form, Larry turns him away. Twice.</p><p>Larry tells himself he's being noble. He can't leave. He can't let the thing inside him leave. They have to endure this torture to keep humanity safe, and even a moment of temptation could doom them all – Larry's never exactly been good at resisting temptation, has he? The spirit has to understand this, he thinks as the guards drag him back to the test chamber. It can't be angry with him. It</p><p>can't<br/>
<i>be.</i></p><p>
  <i>It's the first day of his latest transfer, that fresh afternoon hour when Larry has unpacked his sons' toybox and Sheryl is making a plate of sandwiches in her new kitchen. Larry feels a surge of gratitude as he watches this woman who loves him even though he doesn't deserve it, who kisses him every time he promises to finally be the man she thought she married, who might actually believe him.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>This time he'll mean it. He's normal now, he's learned discipline, he's taken the insults and beatings and shock treatments that his parents whispered might fix him. She slices the sandwiches – down the center, perfectly straight – and he catches her eye and she smiles, and he decides that if this is the best life gives him he's still a lucky man. This time he'll appreciate it.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Then he vaguely remembers that he already got a second chance at something, and if he's back here it must not have ended well.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>The floor ignites, and he suddenly remembers why.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Flames lick up the wallpaper and across the carpet. Sheryl drops the platter and scatters ham and swiss onto the tile. The boys, she says as it shatters. Save the boys. But the fire swallows him and he can't do anything but watch her burn up, her voice thickening with smoke but crying all the while for help – what kind of father won't protect his own sons? Her eyes are full of recrimination as they pop and</i>
</p><p><i>trickle</i><br/>
down – </p><p>Larry knows his own guilt. And the lingering image of Sheryl as he snaps awake is too cruel to be even that. It's the spirit – a thing that won't or can't talk but can hurt him with surgical precision, worse than anything Forsythe has done.</p><p>The man in 722 can speak to it, Larry thinks on the way to his cell. There has to be something he can do. He remembers the spirit on video again – it looked too gorgeously otherworldly to be so vicious.</p><p>But when Larry drags his suit's oxygen tank across the room and raps the wall, there's no response.</p><p>“Are you there?” he asks.</p><p>Nothing.</p><p>“I'm sorry. About the escape. About everything.”</p><p>Nothing at all.</p><p>“I – I didn't mean what I said. I don't want you to leave me alone.”</p><p>It's too late, Larry thinks. Despite everything he's still the man who cuts people loose whenever they ask too much of him. Now there's nobody to replace them and nowhere to run from the suffocating weight of their silence.</p><p>“Please. I need to talk to it – him – my friend. He's...”</p><p><i>He's hurting me,</i> he starts to say. Then he imagines the man's response: <i>You didn't care when they were hurting him.</i></p><p>Larry rests his head against the tank, defeated. His eyes are always dry – another thing the spirit has taken from him – but his body shakes with sorrow. All the worse for knowing he deserves every ounce of it.</p><p>The subject on the other side of the wall (whose name is Flex Mentallo, although he'll forget it later) can hear the sobs in 721. Every muscular impulse tells Flex to help; the guy over there might be chicken, but his pain is real, and it can't be good for Sparky either. Then Flex reminds his muscles of the bureau's threat and closed-circuit feed, Dolores and the furnace. He can't give them a reason to hurt her so soon, before he can figure out how this place works. And so two men sit a few feet apart, each locked in their own misery with their own burning women...</p><p>Ah. Omniscient narration. Time to move on.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>***</p>
</div><p>Larry watches everyone he loves burn, and since the list of people Larry loves is short, he watches them burn incessantly. He fears Forsythe's smirk and the test chamber and the spirit, which he now knows is every bit as monstrous as him. But the worst fears are the ones that used to be pleasures. He fears his children's laughter. He fears sleep. He fears John.</p><p>He tries to transmute fear into hatred – the protection he's seen so many men choose. When his neighbor gets a television he manages briefly. Then he's just grateful to hear voices, even ones spouting stilted soap opera lines. So the fear settles into his bones and consumes them until he feels as fragile as origami. He would beg Forsythe to stop now – or at least to torture him and leave him conscious – but Forsythe might drag details from him, and Larry can't stand the risk of giving up John. He does beg the spirit, silently, constantly. Maybe the spirit is too caught up in its own pain to notice. Or maybe it hates him even more than he hates himself.</p><p>The Ant Farm starts feeling less real. The burning feels realer. Sometimes he's not sure which one is the nightmare.</p><p>Agents throw around an unofficial classification in the Ant Farm: <i>husked</i>. A husked test subject has been pushed beyond the limits of even a deviant mind. Some no longer blink and others perpetually scream; some are numb to pain and others find the slightest touch unbearable. All have lost the force that connects them to the flow of time and circumstance.</p><p>Larry, however, is not husked. There is a fragment of him they can't reach, kept alive by the first moments of every nightmare – the part that reminds him of having a life before burning it away. When he kisses John and smiles at Sheryl he tries to forget what's coming next; he knows the false hope makes things worse but can't stop himself from wanting it.</p><p>“They'll be through with you sometime,” he tells the spirit while he's curled on the floor of his cell exhausted. “You really want to find out what's next?”</p><p>He doesn't expect an answer and he's stopped worrying about being overheard. The soaps in 722 cover that.</p><p>“You want a pretty good idea? Try digging through my brain for <i>atom bomb</i>. Or <i>Hiroshima</i>.”</p><p>He thinks again of the video and the spirit's deadly grace.</p><p>“You don't care, do you? And you sure as hell don't care that I care. You just need a meat shell to hide out in.” The suit's seams have started cutting into his not-skin. It's probably not long until the next test anyway. “Goddamn cosmic entity and you can't find your way out of a box without me.”</p><p>The moments get shorter after that.</p><p>Still the Ant Farm holds its pattern, and so does Larry: extraction, test, nightmare, de-extraction, despair, repeat. He's developed a nearly subconscious awareness of any minor variation – an alternate path to the test chamber, an orderly running late from a cigarette break. Then, long after he stopped counting the days... a deviation.</p><p>This is not the right path. This is not the right time. A new cycle is beginning.</p><p>The new cycle is four flights of stairs, one up, five down. The Ant Farm goes deeper than he thought. The halls narrow and their lights dim, and only patches of filthy tile suggest that they've ever looked habitable. Another flight down. A round room. All doors.</p><p>His new cell has one caged bulb and nothing else – not even a number, barely enough space to lie down.</p><p>“What's happening? Where is this?”</p><p>“Nowhere anybody gives a fuck about.” For once, a tech speaks. “Your experiment is being put on hold.”</p><p>“What does that mean?”</p><p>“It means we're done with you. Indefinitely.”</p><p>The door clangs shut, and Larry is alone.</p><p>So this is how it ends. With him forgotten in a storage closet.</p><p>At least the world is safe. That's the only thing that matters, isn't it? However long he turns out to live, however many times the spirit knocks him out and he wakes up and remembers he's in a coffin, and – fuck, no, of course that's not the only thing that matters. Feeling sun on his face matters. The thrill of flight matters. John matters. Even if they're all equally impossible now, except in whatever nightmares the spirit sends him.</p><p>“Excuse the interruption, Captain Trainor.”</p><p>There's a voice outside, and it isn't Forsythe.</p><p>Larry instinctively backs against the wall. Nothing changes for the better in the Ant Farm. But he has to know:</p><p>“Who are you?”</p><p>“My name is Niles Caulder.” The man's voice has an arch aristocratic patina and something rougher underneath. “I'm here to get you out.”</p><p>“I thought you people were done with me.”</p><p>“I don't mean for an experiment. I've made... call them less than official arrangements for your release.”</p><p>No. He can't take this choice again.</p><p>“It's not safe,” Larry says. “If I expose you –”</p><p>“That suit was built for exploring the blast ruins of a 29-megaton nuclear explosive. Our way out is short and empty. And I'm unusually good at keeping myself safe.”</p><p>Larry hesitates.</p><p>“We're on a timetable,” says Caulder. “If you need to think this over, do it quickly.”</p><p>Finally, hands trembling, Larry approaches the door. A lock clicks.</p><p>Another man might have questions. How Caulder knows the precise payload the suit was designed for. How he showed up to play savior at precisely Larry's lowest, most vulnerable moment. How he knows the Ant Farm so well.</p><p>Larry asks no questions. He obeys Niles Caulder – not only because is it 1966 and he is so desperately tired, but because no matter how often he disappoints them, Larry Trainor will always end up trying to be the person everyone wants him to be.</p><p>
  <i>«Wait. That's not true.»</i>
</p><p>He does not say this.</p><p>
  <i>«That's not true either.»</i>
</p><p>Larry keeps not speaking, as if unaware how much more onerous conveying a disconnect between narration and character behavior is in text than television.</p><p><i>«I'm just saying, I am not </i>always<i> that. Things change.»</i></p><p>He feels shakily <i>and silently</i> for the oxygen tank behind him.</p><p>
  <i>«Fine. I was that. For years. And if I wasn't that I was nothing. Because I thought I'd never have anything worth replacing it with.»</i>
</p><p>Again, Larry does not have this level of meta-awareness about his character motivations.</p><p>
  <i>«It's not meta, it's just hard. People I cared about started needing... something instead of nothing. <i>I</i> had to figure out what it was going to be.»</i>
</p><p>Larry takes a last look behind him, considering the coming pages of mental and physical recovery and gradual reconciliation with the creature who shares his form.</p><p>
  <i>«Is that really necessary? There was an entire season about it.»</i>
</p><p>Then, flesh suddenly chilled in a skin of someone else's making, Larry Trainor opens the cell door. As he leaves, the Ant Farm's hideously normal rhythm stutters only for a moment. To an ant, one piece of food is much like another. The bureau's men come from nowhere and to nowhere they will return, always in brisk and aimless strides.</p><p>Someday Larry will in fact decide that normal is not inevitable. On that day, everything will change. But for now, it's much too far away to worry about.</p><p><i>And that,</i> types the author, <i>is how you stop a one-shot from becoming a series.</i></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Stopping fanfiction from taking over my life: It's not meta, it's just hard. Especially when life gives me an atomic age nightmare science lab to work with.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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